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Topic: Re: Siliconate War (Read 9314 times)

Steve, I wanted to post my Pitariad teaser in a new thread, but I just realized that I don't have the rights to create new threads yet. Only replies. )

From the Pitari point of view, things looked rather different...

The Pitari learned that they were farther behind the Crucians and their Zarkolyan lackeys than they'd realized. However, they were able to get a lot of good scanner telemetry of a number of advanced weapons and other systems, so the "battle" wasn't a total loss. Regardless, the Pitari leaders decided that they simply were far from ready to take on the Star Union. Also, they didn't want to get involved in this war if they could avoid it. They had no points of contact with this new race the Crucian dog called a "Demon", and there was no profit in looking for trouble. The Pitari Matriarch decided that the Pitariad would withdraw from contact with The Inferior Races until such time as the Fleet was ready.

"The Matriarch" is the translated title of the Pitariad's absolute monarch. And the Matriarch at that time was royally (pardon the pun) pissed off when she learned about the result of her raiding force's retreat in the face of the Inferiors. She didn't blame "Admiral" Sreena Raan Tirinatta, much as she would have liked to. Tirinatta acted properly in preserving her command and bringing back this valuable information on their enemies and about the wider war going on outside of the Pitariad. The Matriarch was enraged that her Blood Fleet was forced to run by these ... these ... damned Inferiors, the Crucians and their Zarkolyan puppets. Damn them all to the eternal hells!!!

(She was a little PO'd.)

The Matriarch ordered that the highest priority be placed on R&D to close the gap and surpass the technology of the Star Union. No effort was to be spared. The Matriarch would have her vengeance!

===

Oh, and yes, a star empire with an absolute ruler called The Matriarch is most certainly a matriarchal society. A *very* matriarchal society!

Here's the super-super-simplified racial profile on the Pitariad. They're a matriarchal society of lizard-like beings who have a society and government that's an absolute monarchy with some strong hints of fascism.

===

I do have more on the Pitariad, but I'm going hold off on posting it for now. It needs to be pulled together better before I release it. And the post-battle Pitari PoV stuff is a bit less set in stone than the previous stuff. I haven't completely locked down that part of Pitari history and really hadn't bothered for many years. However, I might do so now.

Also note that I called Sreena Raan Tirinatta an "admiral" in quotes because I don't have the Pitari rank structure set yet, and I'm not particularly fond of the current Pitari flag ranks.

I'm with you. I'm not much of a scenario player. I also like reading the fictional interludes.

It might take me a little while, as my profile on the Pitariad is not complete, but I'll try to pull it together at some point.

I actually wrote up a truly complete profile of the Zarkolyans and gave it to Damon Bradley to include in his next Sky Marshal Ezine.

I would love to see that too. I think Damon is on here as well but I am not sure if he has posted a link to SM#8, or if he doesn't mind you could post the Zarkolyan profile in the Fiction section. Its like getting new 'official' 3rd edition background, which I thought we would never see again.

Quote from: "crucis"

Quote from: "Steve"

Likewise, is there any chance you still have the details of this battle and the background story? It would be great to finally see it included in the ISW4 history.

Steve, which battle are you refering to above ("is there any chance you still have the details of this battle and the background story?")? Are you asking about the First Battle of Rabahl, or the battles between Menkasahr and Beylaktuur? For 1st Rabahl, what I wrote above is about the limit of my info. For the battles between Menkasahr and Beylaktuur, I do have more.

I do have more on the Pitariad, but I'm going hold off on posting it for now. It needs to be pulled together better before I release it. And the post-battle Pitari PoV stuff is a bit less set in stone than the previous stuff. I haven't completely locked down that part of Pitari history and really hadn't bothered for many years. However, I might do so now.

Wow. I went on a bit longer than I'd intended.

Regardless ... enjoy!

I did . Looking forward to seeing more when you have pulled it together.

I haven't stayed in contact with him for a long time, so don't be looking for any scoops on his latest projects. I'm as much in the dark as any of you.

If this was aimed at me due to my asking for any commentary, you need not worry, for I ,gasp, do not like most of Weber's stuff, and despise the Honor Harrington universe. So I could really care less what he is writing now a days. :wink:

BTW, I love that Anti-shield Warhead! I usually tend to go force beam heavy so having a missile warhead that can strip shields would act as a HUGE force modifier for my fleet, making my force beams all the more better.

I'm with you. I'm not much of a scenario player. I also like reading the fictional interludes.

It might take me a little while, as my profile on the Pitariad is not complete, but I'll try to pull it together at some point.

I actually wrote up a truly complete profile of the Zarkolyans and gave it to Damon Bradley to include in his next Sky Marshal Ezine.

I would love to see that too. I think Damon is on here as well but I am not sure if he has posted a link to SM#8, or if he doesn't mind you could post the Zarkolyan profile in the Fiction section. Its like getting new 'official' 3rd edition background, which I thought we would never see again.

SM#8 was released back in July. He's working on SM#9 these days, although I don't know how long it will be before he releases it. I sent him the Zarkolyan profile in late August.

No, no, it was not aimed at anyone. It was just a pre-emptory comment to avoid a barrage of requests about what Dave's doing next, etc.

Personally, I hope its either the next HH or the sequel to Off Armageddon Reef but I am happy to wait and find out

Steve

Steve and anyone else who's interested in DW's books...

I posted this is the Dave Weber newsgroup a couple of weeks ago. I found this link on thefifthimperium info dump site that I visit once in a rare while and was lucky to have found this glorious little tidbit...

"Actually, I just handed in By Schism Rent Asunder. And in another couple of weeks, I'll be handing in By Heresies Distressed. I'm not sure what the scheduled release date for either book will be, but they'll have the third book in plenty of time to position at my January of 2009.

As you may have observed sometimes happens with me, single books turn into a book plus a sequel, and that's basically what's happened here. The bad news is that I was supposed to have the second book in the series handed in by the end of April, so I'm running about three months late. On the other hand, three to four months is my usual writing time for a single book, so since I'm actually handing in two of them, I'm about on schedule in terms of production time. The other thing that this means is that I won't have to hand in another book for TOR until January of 2009, which means that I'll have at least until October 2008 to work on some of the Baen projects which have lagged behind. Hopefully (and please note that I make no guarantees here, given what tends to happen to my life and my work schedule) what's going to happen is that sometime in August, I'll be starting on the sequel to Shadow of Saganami. In the meantime, Eric will have been working on the sequel to Crown of Slaves. As soon as I finish with Saganami 2, I should be able to go directly to work on Crown 2, which should mean (note the qualifier) that I'll have 2 Honorverse novels finished and handed in by the end of 2007. That should give me the first six months or so of 2008 to do the next mainstream Honor novel, and also the sequel to Hell Hath No Fury, which Linda is already looking over. I'd really prefer to do the sequel to Hell Hath No Fury before I start on the next mainstream Honor novel, since I'll just have done two comlete novels set in the Honorverse and I'll really be able to use the break before jumping into the "pull it all together" novel which will fuse the events and consequences of events from the two non-Honor novels. Simon & Schuster, on the other hand, would really prefer to see nothing but Honor novels, in an unending succession, and I'm not sure exactly how that's going to play out. Given that Toni will be getting a total of three Honorverse novels in a space of under one year, she ought to be able to keep the distributors -- and hopefully you guys -- reasonably happy while I work on the next multiverse book.

That's the idea, anyway. If everything goes the way that I hope it will (which, however, it seldom does), I should be able to finish all of this up with a couple of months to spare. On the other hand, next year is Sharon and my 10th anniversary. We're planning on renewing our vows, and it looks like I'll be attending the big book exposition in London in March of 2008. That's not positive yet, but it's what we're working towards. And if it happens, then Sharon and I will probably head on to Ireland for at least a couple of weeks. That's where we went on our honeymoon, so it seems like an appropriate place to go on our 10th anniversary. I'm sure that someone is going to complain that I ought to take my laptop with me and continue working away. However, the love of my life would hit me smartly over the head (over and over) with a large, heavy, and very, very hard stone if I did any such thing. That would tend to preclude any eleventh anniversary, and, anyway, I do hope that you folks will concede that I should get to take at least a couple of weeks off every two or three years whether I really need them or not."

BTW, the Hell's Gate series is an idea that Dave described to me about 15 or more years ago. I think that I read in some interview at Sci-Fi.com where he said something about how this was an idea that he had floating around for many years but never had time to write. I knew when I first read Hell's Gate that it was incredibly similar to the idea that Dave described to me. About the only differences are a) the mental-like abilities of the Sharonans and b) in his original idea, Sharona wasn't used as Arcana's enemy, our own Earth was. I remember Dave describing how he wanted to have modern technology get less and less effective the further from our own home dimension the "earth" humans got. And this original idea seems to be manifested in HHNF where the Sharonan mental abilities and the Arcanan magical abilities appear to be growing weaker the further from their home dimensions they go.

One strange thing about the Hell's Gate universe that I'm sure any Starfire player has noticed is that the dimension gates are rather like warp points in effect, since they create WP-like choke points and the different dimensional Earths connected by these gates are rather like Starfire star systems connected by WPs. Even the map in HHNF looked eerily similar to a Starfire map.

Strangely (perhaps), I find myself looking forward more to the Hells Gate and Off Armageddon Reef sequels more than the HH sequels these days. Perhaps, I'm a bit Honor-ed out and find the other universe a little fresher.

That reminds me of when I mentioned to Dave Weber back when he was creating AM warheads that putting AM warheaded missiles on XO racks might be a "bad thing" (since destroying such a missile in its XO rack could destroy the ship).